Friday, March 15, 2013

Chinese doctors have performed more than 330m abortions since the government implemented a controversial family planning policy 40 years ago, according to official data from the health ministry.

China’s one-child policy has been the subject of a heated debate about its economic consequences as the population ages. Forced abortions and sterilisations have also been criticised by human rights campaigners such as Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who sought refuge at the US embassy in Beijing last year.

China first introduced measures to limit the size of the population in 1971, encouraging couples to have fewer children. The one-child rule, with exceptions for ethnic minorities and some rural families, was implemented at the end of the decade.

Since 1971, doctors have performed 336m abortions and 196m sterilisations, the data reveal. They have also inserted 403m intrauterine devices, a normal birth control procedure in the west but one that local officials often force on women in China.

The numbers do not directly equate to “missing” births because some couples who violate the one-child rule have also had abortions or been sterilised, while intrauterine devices can be removed.

A U.S. Army veteran who was fighting for Syrian rebel forces has been declared dead in a graphic YouTube video showing at least a half dozen dead bodies.

The bloodied face of someone resembling Eric Harroun, 30, of Phoenix, was shown in the video, which was posted Wednesday under the title, 'Terrorists, including American Extremist "Eric Harroun" Have Been Terminated.'

MailOnline has not been able to verify whether the image has been doctored or if the person pictured is in fact Harroun, or is even dead. MailOnline has reached out to Harroun and his family members regarding the video, which was first reported by AOL Defense writer Colin Clark.

Someone using Harroun's Facebook account messaged Clark on Friday saying he is alive and well and that the claims were false.

The number of dead pigs found in a river that provides drinking water to Shanghai, China, has risen to 8,354, after local authorities retrieved a further 809 carcasses on Friday.

The Shanghai municipal government has repeatedly assured the city's 23 million residents that tap water remains safe. However, locals remain worried about water contamination from the swollen and rotting carcasses in the Huangpu river.

Jeered by angry protesters demanding an end to austerity and shaken by a resounding rejection of their economic strategy from Italian voters, European leaders gathered for an economic summit meeting Thursday amid few signs that the bloc’s policies were healing the twin blights of rising unemployment and recession.

Instead of bowing to a rising anti-austerity tide, however, leaders seemed determined to stay the course, insisting that only budget cuts and other measures to restore financial stability could return the continent to economic growth and create jobs.

Speaking as thousands of protesters gathered just out of earshot in a nearby Brussels park, Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, the body that organizes the leaders’ summit meetings, emphasized “green shoots” of recovery and said growth was returning, albeit slowly.

Energy drink producer Red Bull says it is being blackmailed, with the perpetrators threatening to place cans of its product contaminated with feces on supermarket shelves.

The company says the threats started several weeks ago. But Marcus Neher of the Salzburg Public Prosecutor's office said Friday that "up to now there has only been a claim of contamination," and the company also says that supermarket checks have shown no signs that the product was tampered with.

In a rebuke of government secrecy, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the CIA must give a fuller response to a lawsuit seeking the spy agency's records on drone attacks.

The CIA's claim that it could neither confirm nor deny whether it has any drone records was inadequate because the government, including President Barack Obama himself, has clearly acknowledged a drone program, the court said.

The ruling was unanimous from a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Following President Obama’s lunch meeting with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill, Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins described the food served and said the president was not able to eat since his “taster” was not present.

“University of Maine recipe for healthy lobster salad — I pointed that out to the president in keeping with the first lady’s initiatives and Fox Family Potato Chips made in Aroostook County where I’m from and wild blueberry pie full of anti-oxidants, see this was a healthy lunch as well. We did have a little ice cream on the pie too, also made in Maine, Gifford’s Ice Cream. So in all seriousness this was well received,” Collins told reporters on Thursday after the meeting at the Capitol.

“Unfortunately, you know, the president can’t,” said Collins when asked if Obama ate at the lunch meeting.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi gave EU leaders a crash course in macroeconomics late on Thursday, emphasizing his concerns about low productivity and high labor costs hurting the euro zone's prospects, officials said.

In a two-hour session with the euro zone's 17 heads of state and government, Draghi, a former professor of economics and political science, took his audience through a range of slides and charts depicting the region's divergences.

The presentation and discussion, which diplomats said was well received by the leaders despite starting at 11 p.m., focused on the growing gap in several member states between how much labor costs and how productive workers are.

Syria has warned it may strike at rebels hiding in neighboring Lebanon if the Lebanese army does not act, the state news agency SANA said on Friday.

Syria's Foreign Ministry told its Lebanese counterpart late on Thursday that a "large number" of militants had crossed Lebanon's northern border into the Syrian town of Tel Kalakh over the past two days, SANA said.

Now this is totally spooky. I've got to do due diligence here and post this; I really don't know what to say. Though I've long distrusted the government, and for obvious reasons, I've recently run into compelling new information that I'll share with you in the near future that I feel completely shows that the Sandy Hook 'actors' story is total disinformation. There seems to be a TON of it on the internet, with much of it I've found coming from one very bad source. That for later; you have to check out this thread from a forum from back in 2010. If this is real, what in the world is going on? I've got my very strong reasons to believe that it is more disinformation. We have to be very careful about everything. Bad information taken as fact can be dangerous. We all need to ask, why is this disinfo being pushed upon us? This story is getting a lot of play at the conspiracy theory website Godlikeproductions. This is webcached from google from the website Unforumzed; much more at links.

Obama use school shooting to disarm America

In approximate 2 years from today there will be mass school shooting in Connecticut. A lone gunman will kill many children. That's a trick of propaganda. Step by step, they make it a totalitarian country.

Egypt's ruling Muslim Brotherhood warns that a U.N. declaration on women's rights could destroy society by allowing a woman to travel, work and use contraception without her husband's approval and letting her control family spending.

The Islamist movement that backs President Mohamed Mursi gave 10 reasons why Muslim countries should "reject and condemn" the declaration, which the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is racing to negotiate a consensus deal on by Friday.

The Brotherhood, whose Freedom and Justice Party propelled Mursi to power in June

Portugal's creditors have eased its budget goals and granted it more time for deeply unpopular spending cuts under its bailout after the economy's outlook worsened further, Finance Minister Vitor Gaspar said on Friday.

The international creditors said they expect gross domestic product to slump by 2.3 percent this year, much deeper than the 1 percent drop they forecast at the time of their last review in November - starkly illustrating the impact of successive waves of austerity on Portugal's already fragile economy.

EU officials worked on a rescue package for Cyprus on Friday, hoping to get approval from the IMF and euro zone finance ministers later in the day.

Senior sources involved in the negotiations said the package is expected to contain a mixture of tax increases, one-off revenue raising measures, plans for privatizations and the overhaul of Cyprus's banking sector to ensure that funding for the bailout is sustainable.

It is possible Russia will help finance the program by extending a 2.5 billion euro loan already made to Cyprus and potentially reducing the interest rate, officials have said.

An announcement on Tuesday marked, quite literally, a watershed moment in the history of solar system exploration. NASA scientists said an analysis of drilled rock samples collected by the Curiosity rover shows that ancient Mars could have supported living microbes.

It is the first time that we've discovered actual evidence for fresh water on another planet.

We've been down this watery path before -- sort of. Back in 2004, NASA's Opportunity rover found evidence of ancient water on Mars.

For a place to be habitable by life as we know it, it has to have liquid water, heat sources like volcanoes or impact craters, and carbon-bearing organic molecules.

Jim O'Neill, the Goldman Sachs economist who famously captured the globe's shifting economic power when he coined the "BRIC" acronym, now says the euro may not exist by 2020.

O'Neill's views were aired at the Spring Ambrosetti Forum, where delegates gathered by the peaceful Lake Como. But unlike its serene waters, many delegates felt the future of the European Union -- which has been destabilized by economic crisis and political infighting -- remained murky.

O'Neill, speaking to CNN at the forum, said: "If we carry on the same way as we are, by 2020 the euro might not exist."

With the carnage in Syria mounting out of control, there's only one thing left to do, France says: Lift a European Union embargo and start arming rebels.

"We must convince our partners, particularly in Europe, that we have no other choice but lift the arms embargo in favor of the (opposition) Syrian Coalition," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius wrote in an op-ed for the French newspaper Liberation.

"We must go ahead and allow the Syrian people to defend themselves against this bloodthirsty regime. It's our responsibility to help the Syrian National Coalition, its leaders and the (rebel) Free Syrian Army by all the possible means.

The nation's aviation security chief on Thursday defended his recent decision to again permit knives aboard commercial flights, despite concerns from major airlines and their flight crews, and sharp criticism from some members of Congress.

John Pistole, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), told a House Homeland Security subcommittee that his decision would stand and would be carried out next month as planned.

He said small knives no longer pose a threat to aircraft security, which now emphasizes bomb detection.

North Korea's state news agency reported Friday that the country's Internet servers are subject to daily "intensive and persistent virus attacks" that the government blames on "hostile forces" including the United States.

"It is nobody's secret that the U.S. and the South Korean puppet regime are massively bolstering up cyberforces in a bid to intensify the subversive activities and sabotages against the DPRK," according to the official KCNA report.

"... They are seriously mistaken if they think they can quell the DPRK's voices of justice through such base acts. The U.S. and its allies should be held wholly accountable for the ensuing consequences."

PanSTARRS was the was the talk of the world this week - and delighted photographers were able to capture the comet as it streaked across the skies of America and the UK. Stargazers in the northern hemisphere had their chance to view the first of two comets set to blaze through the skies in 2013. Comet C/2011 L4 PanSTARRS, already visible for weeks from the Southern Hemisphere, appeared to observers above the equator for the first time this week.

Major General Aviv Kochavi said Iran intended to double the size of this Syrian "people's army", which he claimed was being trained by Hezbollah fighters and funded by Tehran, to bolster a depleted and demoralised Syrian army.

Kochavi, the director of military intelligence in the Israel defence forces (IDF), also said Assad's troops had readied chemical weapons but so far had not been given the order for them to be used.

At the same time, he warned of the increasing sway of extremist groups in the opposition, particularly the al-Nusra Front, which he claimed was beginning to infiltrate Lebanon and was making connections with a Sinai-based militant organisation, Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, which is focused on attacks on Israel.

US President Barack Obama will not be bringing a peace plan to Israel, but he will try to convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli public that after the Arab Spring, Israel cannot depend on autocrats holding everything together in the region.

The US believes that Israel must show it is serious about its peace efforts. It must convince the general Arab public, if nothing more than to maintain Israel's peace treaty with Egypt.

Two men armed with a machine gun and a handgun opened fire in a bar on the outskirts of the Mexican tourist resort of Cancun on Thursday, killing six people and wounding five, the office of the state's attorney general said.

Cancun, a major tourist destination on Mexico's Caribbean coast, has largely escaped the drug-related violence that has racked Acapulco, a faded tourist hot spot on the Pacific coast.

France, Britain and the United States are inching towards providing military aid to Syria's rebels, hoping to beef up more secular forces at the expense of radical Islamists who are gaining ever more prominence in the uprising.

The bitter experience of Afghanistan, where the American arming of anti-Soviet mujahideen forces in the 1980s helped to give rise to the Taliban and al Qaeda, hangs heavy in the air.

And as in Libya, the leaders of Britain and France seem keener than U.S. President Barack Obama to get more involved.

Italy's parliament convenes on Friday almost three weeks after last month's inconclusive election, with the parties still deadlocked over how to form a government in the euro zone's third largest economy.

The first task of the 630 lower house deputies and 315 senators will be to elect the speakers of the two houses. The outcome of the votes for these influential roles could give an indication of the prospects for a stable administration.

The election produced a hung parliament, with the center-left winning control over the lower house Chamber of Deputies but not of the Senate, which has equal legislative powers.

President Barack Obama told Israelis Iran is still more than year away from developing a nuclear weapon and sought to reassure them that military force remains a U.S. option if sanctions and diplomacy fail to thwart its nuclear ambitions.

In an interview with Israeli television broadcast on Thursday, just six days before his visit to the country, Obama appeared to send a message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the need for patience with Washington's Iran strategy while also showing U.S. resolve to confront Tehran if necessary.

The county’s most dangerous terror suspects could be free to walk the streets ‘unconstrained’ next year when powers used to control them expire, a watchdog has warned.

The group of Al Qaeda fanatics includes two alleged members of a gang which plotted to kill thousands by downing Transatlantic airliners and one linked to the failed July 21 bombings.

Currently their activities are limited by powerful court orders forcing them to wear electronic tags, obey curfews and report to the police – and restricting their contact with other dangerous individuals.

EU leaders are meeting at a regular European Council to discuss how growth can be balanced with the fiscal austerity measures taken to tackle the eurozone debt crisis.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, admitted that while the EU had made progress, in tackling the sovereign debt crisis that had threatened the euro, the situation in some countries had reached breaking point.

Israel's military intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, said Thursday that Syrian President Bashar Assad is preparing for the potential use of chemical weapons.

Speaking at a policy and security conference, Kochavi noted that the Syrian military has to date fired some 70 Scud and M-600 missiles, which carried conventional warheads filled with explosives, at populated areas across the country.

The intelligence chief claimed that Iran and Hezbollah have increased their assistance to Assad, each dispatching 50,000 fighters to bolster Syrian military's operations over the past six months.

Cheltenham. That one word conjures up for millions a special week in March, a mixture of sport and noise and comradeship, pints and predictions, dreams realised and crushed.

But there was a different perspective as dawn broke over Cleve Hill in the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside today - Gold Cup Day of all days.

The first thoughts of everyone were for JT McNamara, and all were forced to remember what risks a jump jockey takes, each time he or she dons the silks and goes into partially airborne battle amid tons of horseflesh.